Aberdeen Group Plc

Good morning everyone and thank you very much for joining Siobhan and me for Aberdeen's half year 26 results presentation on what I know is a busy morning for you. Today we're here in our Manchester office, the headquarters of Interactive Investor. We're hoping to be the first FTSE company to present results from Manchester under the new Prime Minister. Anyway, I'm going to begin with an overview of our strategic and financial performance and then Siobhan will take you through the financials in a little more detail before we return to Q&A. So just let me start with a reminder of our ambition. Our aim is to be the UK's leading wealth investments group and our purpose is simple, enabling our clients to be better investors. We're building on a strong foundation. Interactive Investor is the UK's number one direct-to-consumer platform measured by net flows and now has over £100 billion of customer assets. Advisor is the UK's third-largest advice platform, serving over half of the UK advisor market. And Investment is a specialist asset manager with nearly £400 billion of assets and strengths in a number of attractive growth areas. And our group is united by a common set of priorities. We remain focused on transforming performance, improving the client experience, and strengthening our talent and culture. Together, these priorities underpin our strategy to generate sustainable growth and create long-term value for our customers and shareholders. So, on to progress in the first half. Aberdeen has continued its positive trajectory through the first half of the year and I'm increasingly confident in our ability to deliver the ambitious 2026 targets we set out for the Group. Adjusted operating profit increased by 21% to £151 million and net capital generation increased by 47% to £163 million, benefiting from revenue growth, improved efficiency and the actions we've taken to unlock value from our pension surplus. II delivered another excellent result, increasing profit by 22%. In Advisor, profit was broadly flat. We've improved service levels and taken action to strengthen the proposition and improve the client experience. Flows remain a challenge, however, and I'll talk more on our plans to address that in a moment. And in Investments, We are delivering improvements in investment performance while continuing to focus on operational efficiency, with profits up 9%. These results demonstrate how better execution is translating into improved profitability. Let me now quickly review the businesses, starting with AI. AI continues to perform exceptionally well across its key metrics. Customer numbers increased by 14% year-on-year to 525,000, while SIP customers increased by 35% to 125,000. Net inflows reached a new record of £6.8 billion, with positive markets also lifting assets under administration to almost £108 billion. Trading activity was high, in fact above trend in the first half, with daily average retail trades up more than 40%. Importantly, we continue to improve our competitive position. Our repricing has landed well and brand awareness has increased materially over the past year. We are growing share across trading, assets and new accounts while continuing to attract high-value customers with average customer account sizes now over £200,000 which is approximately double the market average. We're also continuing to expand the proposition. The rollout of II360 and II Advice continues and there are further opportunities to attract and engage more investors on the platform, including services like II Community, which has seen membership double in the last year. Combined with our compelling pricing model, excellent service, and continued investment in the brand, we are well positioned to capture the long-term structural growth in UK wealth. We're all excited about II's growth prospects as we take a growing slice of a growing market.

Turning now to Advisor.

In Advisor, our focus through the first half has been on further improving and streamlining our proposition to our clients and their advisors. We've made significant investment in the platform, strengthened leadership with the appointment of Rich Denning, the CEO, and in July, earlier this month, we brought servicing in-house from FNZ. That gives us greater control and end-to-end ownership of the client experience. We're already seeing benefits in the actions we've taken. Our net promoter score is well ahead of target at plus 53. and customer satisfaction has reached 97%. This is because service performance has improved and straight-through processing has increased. Let me give one example. Firm onboarding times have improved by over 90%. At the same time, we're clear that flow performance needs to improve. The market has evolved with advisor consolidation, panel rationalization, and greater competition for transfer business all having an impact. So our focus now is on converting stronger foundations into sustainable commercial performance. We're sharpening our distribution strategy and deepening our relationships with strategic advisor firms. We have a developing pipeline of strategic partnerships and back book migration opportunities supported by our new and improved onboarding capability. and we're taking a disciplined approach to areas that create structural drag. As you know, we previously anticipated that a turnaround in flows would be achieved in 2026. We now expect this return to net inflows to take longer and we'll come back with more colour on this in due course. On this, Rich has already completed a detailed segmentation analysis with early highlights showing where we are growing and where we have work to do. Let me be clear, our conviction in Advisor is unchanged. The proposition is strong, the platform works well, and the operational progress we have made gives us a much stronger base from which to improve flows over time. Turning now to investments. The investments business made further progress during the first half, delivering increased profits, improved investment performance, and encouraging momentum in several specialist growth areas. AUM increased to 398 billion, supported by positive market performance. Three-year investment performance improved to 86% of assets performing against benchmark, significantly above our target of 70%, while one-year performance increased to 88%. We're seeing positive momentum in a number of our equity strategies particularly emerging markets and thematic capabilities, alongside continued strong delivery from fixed income, liquidity, quants and alts. We're also seeing encouraging momentum across our specialist capabilities. Real assets generated 1.4 billion in net inflows in the half. Our infrastructure also completed the successful first close of approximately £800 million for its flagship rail fund. In the wholesale channel, we have delivered positive flows in 10 of the last 12 months, with demand improving across equities, fixed income and commodities, as market conditions stabilised in the second half of Q2. Our emerging markets franchise continues to see strong client interest, supported by a number of 4- and 5-star rated investment strategies. Looking ahead, we remain focused on accelerating growth across our highest conviction opportunities, including private markets, closed-end funds and commodities, supported by deeper strategic partnerships. With the completion of the Stagecoach and MFS transactions and the forthcoming edition of Herald, we have further strengthened our investing capabilities and supported profitability. Our target of 100 million of adjusted operating profit in investments for 2026 was always an ambitious goal. That said, with profit for the second half expected to be materially higher than the first, not least reflecting the earnings benefit from our bolt-on acquisitions, I expect we will be broadly in line with this target based on annualised second half profit. A few words now on AI, a theme which is rightly at the front of mind for many investors. AI is emerging as a meaningful enabler of growth and efficiency across our group. Our aim is to invest and adapt meaningfully so that AI becomes a core part of how we operate now and in the future. Of course, whilst always acting in a responsible manner. What has particularly encouraged me is the enthusiasm of our colleagues. As we roll out Copilot Premium across the business, colleagues are embracing the opportunity to learn, experiment, and apply AI in their day-to-day work. We also have teams operating at a strategic level, deploying AI into products, software development and accelerating processes, building on some excellent work we've undertaken on unifying and structuring our data. Adoption continues to increase rapidly and colleagues are reporting meaningful time savings and improved outcomes. but it's premature to forecast how AI will affect the business or our markets. In fact, I don't believe anyone knows. What I do know is that our culture has embraced AI and the strong early adoption today across our group sets us up very well to benefit from artificial intelligence. And just a quick comment on progress against our group targets. For less than six months to the end of the current planned period, We're confident in our ability to deliver the full-year 2026 Group Targets which were adjusted operating profit of more than 300 million and net capital generation of around 300. The first half has demonstrated we're on track to achieve these targets. Our focus beyond 2026 remains on achieving our growth potential across the Group with sustainable profitability, supporting investment in the business and the dividend. all underpinned by a very strong balance sheet. As part of this, and as we set out at the time of our full year results, we expect 5% to 10% growth in net capital generation per annum over the medium term on top of our 26 targets, obviously without any major market irregularities. So thank you. With that, I'll hand over to Siobhan to take you through the financial performance.